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Food Retail: Turn up the flavour

If 85% of your customers don’t know the name of the outlet they are in you need a better way of talking to them. We helped Sheffield Hallam University’s catering services do just that.

Sheffield Hallam University has 16 food outlets spread across two campuses catering for 35,000 hungry staff and students. Having done our research we found, amongst other things, that 85% of customers didn’t know the name of the outlet they were in despite 98% of customers enjoying the food and service.

You can have a great product, fantastic service, a captive target market but without the right message or communication channel the opportunity to really build customer loyalty can’t be harnessed.

SHU Catering Services have a great product, or so their customers told us. It’s just they didn’t know what to call it. “Hey, I’ll meet you at the… cafe?…”

And they didn’t know all the other important stuff that went on behind the scenes to get the food to the table, like the commitment to sustainability and locally sourced products or the commitment to reinvesting profits back into the service. Many customers assumed campus cafes were outsourced franchises. Nothing to do with the university at all.

Enter “Taste Hallam”, a strategy for catering services to realise their marketing potential. It’s a single idea communicated in a consistent voice through digital and physical channels. The strategy enables everything from messaging, packaging, outlet branding to customer feedback all to come under the Taste Hallam umbrella. Oh yeah, it also has some pretty punchy graphics delivered through all the right social media channels.

Taste Hallam has given Catering Services a voice that can tell customers loudly and proudly that it’s MADE FOR YOU!

Launch week was a lot of fun, with great engagement, competitions and 200,000 impressions across social media. It also spawned a dance called the bacon shuffle. We’re not sure either.